Data Tape Growth Market Seeing Myriad Expansions, Innovations

Data Tape Growth Market Seeing Myriad Expansions, Innovations

By Michael

April 17, 2015

Data tapes have long been one of the best options on the marketplace for data storage, offering convenient on-site storage capabilities with terrabytes of data space. The growth of this format is still strong, with plenty of functions found time and time again in the marketplace.

Tape growth has reached new standards, according to a press release from Storage Newsletter. Enterprise tapes have reached native capacities of more than 10 terrabytes with data rates having expanded over 360 megabytes per second, while enterprise tape libraries can scale even further, some by more than one exabyte. To add to this growth, enterprise tape manufacturers have found that future cartridge capabilities will expand even further, with the future seeing a single cartridge matching the storage space of nearly 15,000 Blu-ray movies.

Additionally, storage centers continue to find new breakthroughs, the news source added. Various changes and improvements in the industry have seen enterprise tape drives expand further than ever before with larger native capacities, data cartridge production reaching new milestones and further breakthroughs occurring when it comes to tape support and extending the technological abilities of different products. Modern tapes are said to now have improved reliability, capacity, power efficiency, ease of use and lowest costs per gigabyte used of any possible entry on the market.

New record for storage ability broken
Tape storage is perceived by some in the industry to be an unattractive or dwindling option, but it’s holding together pretty well, as eWeek noted. Continuing use of data requires new and varied forms of storage to be adopted, and 45 percent of enterprises still use the technology. Its use may leap in the near future, too. IBM scientists were recently able to achieve high rates of improvement when it comes to tape storage density, being able to achieve a new areal recording density of up to 123 billion bits of uncompressed data per square inch on low-cost magnetic tape.

This was an improvement of 88 times over latest industry tape standards, as well as 22 times more storage than IBM’s current enterprise class tapes. In addition, IBM has been able to find better means of reading magnetic bits’ accuracy rates, helping find an increase in recording density of as much as 76 percent from older methods in the market. Undoubtedly, advances like these mean a lot in the future of the industry.